Reform or Revolution — a reply by Cliff Slaughter to T. Whelan's booklet 'The Credibility Gap—the politics of the SLL' (Final part)

6 Whelan & Mandel

BEFORE we turn to Whelan's main attack, which is directed at the statement of the SLL Political Committee of October 25, 1969, 'A Political Challenge', it is important to note how he takes up the defence of the spokesmen of the Pabloite 'United Secretariat' which he previously told us had 'capitulated to imperialism'.

The following long quotation from Whelan illustrates (a) the way in which Whelan has come to defend the most opportunist programmatic revisions of Trotskyism by the Pabloite Mandel, and, (b) the utterly unprincipled way in which Whelan distorts quotations from his opponents, in order to cover up his tracks.

Whelan refers to a series of articles in which Cliff Slaughter replied to Mandel's booklet 'Marxism vs. Ultraleftism':

'In the second of these articles ("The Newsletter" February 11, 1969) Slaughter quotes from an article by Ernest Mandel in the Belgian paper "La Gauche" of December 24, 1960 [i.e. during the Belgian General Strike, CS]: "In 'La Gauche' we have proposed a clear formula: a government of the workers supported by the trade unions."

'He then quotes terms on which Mandel said the Belgian Socialist Party might form a coalition, and cites the verdict of the French co-thinker Gerard Bloch: Mandel "substituted an alternative both of the terms of which amounted to vulgar reformism, vulgar parliamentarism".

'Now we don't know all the details of the Belgian General Strike; it was a bit before our time, though judging by, in particular, Tom Kemp's pamphlet, Mandel's line was generally correct. But we do know that Slaughter's "critique", symptomatic of a certain infantile disorder, can only disorient those — presumably his followers — whom he is trying to educate.

'For Slaughter attacks Mandel's "advocacy in Belgium of a coalition government under pressure of the masses", an attack which seems to reveal more Slaughter's than Mandel's mistakes. May we remind him: since the collapse of the Third International, there have not been mass revolutionary parties in the advanced capitalist countries. What there have been are revolutionary organizations, the nuclei of future revolutionary parties. As he is discovering, the tactical problems of building these parties, in a workers' movement dominated by reformism and Stalinism, are considerable. And yet, arguing on the level on which he operates, one could denounce the Bolshevik Party for putting forward, in 1917, the slogan "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers".' (p. 52.)

One suspects that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was also 'a bit before Whelan's time', but we certainly cannot excuse him for his ignorance of it, any more than we can excuse him for his distortion, not ignorance, of the essential difference over the Belgian General Strike.

Patience in unravelling this long quotation from Whelan will prove worthwhile.

A workers' government

The question of workers' parties participating in coalition governments with bourgeois parties, however much one talks about 'mass pressure', is not at all a tactical question, but one of basic principle, and has been recognized as such by Marxists ever since the French Socialist Millerand joined a bourgeois Ministry at the turn of the century.

Now Whelan says that Mandel's line in 1960-1961 seems to him correct. But if we take the whole quotation from 'The Newsletter's' reply to Mandel, and not just the sentence selected by Whelan, it becomes crystal-clear, from Mandel himself, that he was talking about the Socialist Party joining a bourgeois coalition.

We therefore reproduce the whole passage from 'The Newsletter' underlining the short piece abstracted by Whelan.

'In 1953, when the French Trotskyists raised the slogan: "A government representing the workers, built from the national strike committee of the workers' parties and the trade unions!", Mandel and Pablo had condemned them as "sectarian" and "adventurist".

'In 1960-1961, Mandel showed exactly what he had meant by this and what a betrayal his revisionism had led to.

'Writing in "La Gauche" (December 24, 1960), Mandel says:

'"The strike is directed against the government as collective representative of the capitalist class rather than of this or that group of bosses. Inescapably the movement leads to the defeat of the government. But what to replace it with? That is the question.

'"In 'La Gauche', we have proposed a clear formula: A government of the workers supported by the trade unions".

'Had Mandel come over to the correct position of the French Trotskyists in 1953? On the contrary, he soon showed that he meant the exact opposite!

'"The workers fear," he continues, "that if the government falls in the present social crisis, the Belgian Socialist Party (PSB) will enter a new coalition in order to prevent a situation in which the country would be without a government."

'Says Mandel, this would only be acceptable if:

'"First, the new government abandoned the 'loi unique'; second, that the essential points in the structural reforms be kept as Cabinet policy."

'And further:

'". . . it will be enough for the Christian-Democrat MPs to heed the voice of their own electors, that under the pressure of the strike they take a position in line with the aspirations of those they represent, for a new parliamentary majority to take shape on at least these two questions."

'In place of the slogan, "a workers' government", Mandel, as Gerard Bloch summarized it ("La Verite", no. 522, p. 72): "substituted an alternative both of the terms of which amounted to vulgar reformism, vulgar parliamentarism".'

From this there emerge a number of uncomfortable facts for Whelan and his revisionist promoters.

First, Whelan's selective method of quotation hides the fact that what Mandel proposed was a coalition with a capitalist party, the Christian-Democrats, whereas Whelan quotes only a sentence which gives the impression that he probably meant a government of workers' parties. (' . . . a government of the workers supported by the trade unions').

Second, that the proposed programme of such a government was, as Bloch rightly says, thoroughly reformist.

Third, the reference to the Bolshevik slogan of 1917 is used to suggest the exact opposite of what it actually meant.

'Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers' was a slogan directed against the coalition with capitalist parties, i.e. against the very type of coalition proposed by Mandel!

Whelan stands history on its head in order to be able to defend the revisionists from the Socialist Labour League. Not content with that, when he finds that what Mandel says is indefensible, he deliberately creates the impression that he said the opposite.

We criticised Whelan's method as that of an isolated individual unable to speak from the standpoint of building a party. We challenged him to state his relationship to the actual history of the political tendencies in the Trotskyist movement.

We need not wait for his answer. His problem is not, as he tries to make out, inability to see our position as 'realistic', but his agreement with the most reactionary aspect of the politics of the revisionists, and his willingness to use the most unprincipled methods in order to justify them.

7 The SLL and the Labour government

ONE especially important reason for taking in detail the above material on the Belgian General Strike is to establish Whelan's political position on the basic questions of reform and revolution, a workers' government, and the building of independent revolutionary parties.

Whelan, though objecting to our use of the term 'Pabloite revisionism', ended up with the Pablo position, that 'mass pressure' would force non-revolutionary (and in this case even capitalist) parties to do the work for the working class.

It is really this viewpoint which impels him to attack the SLL position on the Labour government.

Whelan tells us that we have an entirely exaggerated picture of the seriousness of the economic and political situation. For example:

'. . . we can say with reasonable confidence that in Britain unemployment is not going to become severe in the near future.' (!) (p. 38.)

With such confidence in the stability in the capitalist system (characteristic of revisionists) and such blindness to the actual trends, what sort of working-class leadership can be offered by Whelan and his friends?

As we keep on insisting, they approach political questions, life-and-death questions for the working class, not with the fighting responsibility of building the revolutionary alternative, but with the bland and rotten cynicism of the middle class.

One reason why Whelan was 'reasonably confident' there would be no serious unemployment problem was:

' . . . there is a General Election on the horizon, and if the best Tory prime minister of this century (i.e. Wilson) does not follow the example of all his recent predecessors and engineer a pre-election boom, we will be very surprised indeed.'

Far from there being a pre-election boom, a crisis election was called, a year before the end of the government's term, (which Whelan, again, was confident they would last out) because there could not this time be any 'boom'.

The strength of the working class was mounting too rapidly so long as Labour stayed in power. In calling the Election, Wilson carried out the policies of the capitalist class. All these things are now undeniable facts, and contrast sharply with Whelan's dismissal of our statement in 'A Political Challenge' that 'The government's policies and the employers' plans are one and the same thing.'

We never at any time failed to make clear that these policies paved the way directly for the return of the Tories, in order for them to implement the next necessary phase of the employers' policy.

The essence of our document 'A Political Challenge' was to warn that the mounting strength demonstrated by the workers in economic strike struggles was itself creating a situation, where the struggle for power was involved, and for which the essential preparation must be political.

In other words, we were explaining the qualitative political preparation necessary in the period opened up by the strike wave of the low-paid workers.

It is because he rejects any possibility of capitalist crisis, and considers that the reformists and the union bureaucracy can keep permanent control of the workers, that Whelan dismisses this essential content.

Whelan descends again to the misuse of quotations. He starts with an extract from the beginning of 'A Political Challenge':

'Whatever the form taken by the strike struggle . . . the content of them goes very deep because whole sections of the class are acting independently of their leadership in response to the deepest crisis of the system.'

Laying on the sarcasm, Whelan comments:

'"Form" of the strike struggle? "Content" of the strike struggle? Are these concepts — no doubt, united opposites — exactly clear? Are they clearly explained, even?'

Quotations or distortions

This is the old trick of butchering quotations. We now print the quote taken by Whelan with the omitted phrases restored, just as it first appeared in Workers Press. The reader can make the comparison himself:

'Whatever the form of the struggle — against unemployment in the car industry and in GEC-EE, for parity with the best-paid motor industry areas, for the eight-hour day in mining, for equal pay for women, for substantial increases for the dustmen — the content of them goes very deep because whole sections of the class are acting independently of their leadership in response to the deepest crisis of the system.'

It is quite evident that we detailed the 'form' of the struggles with a series of examples which Whelan just omitted, presumably to make it easier for him to say that we did not 'clearly explain' ourselves!

The 'content' of the struggles is also clear from the same passage, but if it was not, we find only two sentences before in 'A Political Challenge':

'These effects of the world crisis — the threat of further unemployment, price rises, curtailment of investment, entry into the Common Market, speed-up and rationalization by the big monopolies helped by state finance — now begin to weld together the working class as a fighting force.'

Whelan's sneers at dialectics are not accidental. He answers our analysis in 'A Political Challenge' by pointing out that the trade union leaders were able to reimpose their control, that we exaggerated in speaking of workers breaking free of bureaucracy, that only one million out of 20 million workers were on strike, that some scabbed, that teachers emulated dustmen's wage demands out of snobbery, etc.

This is just like his objections to the 'hard work' of the members of the revolutionary party.

Everything must be summoned up to prove that the time is not ripe for revolutionary work, that defeats, divisions and bureaucracy are the norm. Then it becomes necessary to paint the Marxists as if they were hot gospellers, imagining revolutionary upsurge from the workers at every turn, only to find themselves confounded by 'realists' like Whelan.

But our document was precisely a political challenge. To break the grip of the bureaucracy requires a political struggle to build the revolutionary party. To ignore this task is to leave the reformists and bureaucrats in a position to perpetrate disaster on the working class.

This, for example, was the meaning of our warning against the illusions of strength which could result from the strike struggles. We did not say, as Whelan suggests, that it was not possible to win concessions. On the contrary, we said:

'The strength of the organized workers in these strikes can and will force certain concessions from the employers and the government which supports them.

'But the government and the employers will continue to press forward, in whatever ways they can find, with exactly the type of policy which has produced higher prices, cuts in public spending, reductions of credit and deflationary policies.'

And later, we emphasized:

'The Tories and the right-wing Labour leaders can only go on by provoking the severest clashes.'

Again:

'The present wave of strikes is an essential preparation for the struggle against unemployment, because these strikes accelerate the unification of the working class. Most essential is a socialist policy and leadership to direct this strength.'

Now, Mr Whelan. Were we right in posing this question in a dialectical, contradictory way, from the standpoint of how to intervene to overcome the dangers inherent in the very strength of the workers industrially, or were you right in your anti-dialectical, 'common-sense' deduction from 'experience' that there would be a full term for the Labour government and a 'pre-election boom' (which by rights we ought to be in the middle of right now!)?

Since Whelan's whole aim in his booklet is to prove that we have been wrong on perspectives and revolutionary preparations, one must ask the IMG whether they are still 'very pleased' to have published Comrade TW's analysis . . .

On this question, one note needs to be added. Whelan makes great play of the defeat of the anti-union laws in June 1969 as being in some way a refutation of the line of the SLL, and says that 'pressure' changed the government's policy.

He takes it as contradicting our statement 'The government's policies and the employers' plans are one and the same thing'. The first question is: Did the strikes in June 1969 change the government's policy? Doesn't such a claim hide the essence of the question that the government were prevented from implementing their policy, precisely by fighting against their capitalist policy?

Secondly — and we are back to the dialectic so hated by Whelan — did not this defeat for the government make all the more inevitable the resignation of the government in face of the forces which it unleashed, and not at all a change in the government's policy in favour of the working class?

Revolution and reformism

The Socialist Labour League did not, as Whelan suggests, content itself with abstract statements about what the government could or could not do.

It organized the fight against the aniti-union laws, a fight which began with our initiatives against the prices and incomes legislation, when Whelan's Pabloite friends were collaborating with the Stalinists in denouncing us as 'premature' and 'sectarian'.

We remind Whelan: it was not 'before his time' that the predecessors of the IMG were telling us that the Wilson regime was 'left reformist' and that it was wrong to characterize it as a capitalist government.

And so the whole reformist line contained in Whelan's defence of Mandel and his bourgeois coalition government comes out clearly in his criticism of the Socialist Labour League in Britain.

This is only proper. But we cannot leave the matter of political perspectives for Britain and his denunciation of our 'sectarianism', 'ultra-leftism', 'infantile disorder' and the rest, without pointing out to him and his friends that in between the writing and the publication of his attacks there occurred a General Election.

What was the line in this election of the International Marxist Group, into whose arms ran Whelan, outraged by the 'sectarianism' of the Socialist Labour League?

While the SLL fought for the maximum Labour vote, as part of the struggle for socialist policies, the IMG, in its organ, 'The Red Mole', did not campaign for a Labour vote. In the issue immediately preceding the Election, its front page shouted, 'Whoever wins on June 18 the workers will have to FIGHT!'

How very profound! What splendidy 'realistic', 'scientific' leadership! The editorial in the same issue, headed 'Elections', did not say vote Labour and concentrated on pointing out that the vote was of no importance.

'The Red Mole' of April 15 carried a two-page spread by Robin Blackburn (who later graced the IMG's Trotsky Memorial meeting platform on August 21) entitled, 'Let it Bleed — Labour and the General Election'.

It included the following passage, the gist of the article:

'I will therefore conclude that the only principled course for revolutionary socialists during the coming election will be an active campaign to discredit both of Britain's largest capitalist parties (i.e., for Blackburn, the Tory and Labour Parties). In this campaign we should certainly pull none of our punches. We should disrupt the campaigns of the bourgeois parties (Tory and Labour, CS) and their leading spokesmen using all the imaginative and direct methods which the last few years have taught us.'

This line dominated the pre-election statements of IMG spokesmen, and only 'The Red Mole' of the pre-election fortnight (from whose editorial we have already quoted) did Pat Jordan, in a signed article, make a feeble attempt to put up a corrective to Blackburn, and even he could not bring himself to advocate a campaign for a Labour vote.

Where then is Whelan to go? He condemns the SLL for saying the Labour government is a capitalist government (though even the india-rubber man Pat Jordan got round to saying that by the time of the Election!), but finds himself allied with Blackburn, who says the Labour Party is a capitalist Party!

Before leaving the question of the relation between the work of the revolutionary party and the reformist Labour Party, we must expose an even more blatant example of Whelan's lies. He condemns us for warning against Stalinism at the first meeting of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and then throws out the following, supposedly to show what behaviour in a 'united front' ought to be like.

'Even the SLL is aware of this sort of situation: on that famous occasion when Gerry Healy spoke in Trafalgar Square from the same platform as Harold Wilson, during the Labour Party's campaign against the Tories' invasion of Suez, he did not renounce the man next to him . . . '

He would have had great difficulty in so doing . . . because no such 'famous occasion' ever happened.

It is a pure invention of Mr Whelan!

It would take a booklet to equal length to Whelan's to expose all his distortions, but in this example he has gone to the limit of actually inventing a complete lie. This is his politics.

The only difficulty is to know whether to warn Whelan of the awful political prospect of association with Blackburn, who combines this dangerous adventurism with the friendliest of relations with the Stalinists, or to point out to Blackburn and Jordan what a gem they have acquired in Whelan!

All Whelan's conclusions about the SLL turn out to be based on worthless impressions and downright distortions. His own political past and the nature of the political tendency he has now joined (IMG) he tries to avoid, but it is easily exposed.

The IMG itself adds its mite to the lies. In its introduction welcoming Whelan, it accuses the SLL of having broken with the Fourth International. They know this is a pack of lies.

It was their own predecessors and mentors, Pablo and Mandel, who abandoned the Transitional Programme, the method of Marxism, and the building of independent revolutionary parties.

The fact that they usurped the name of the Fourth International is on a par with the fact that the Stalinists call themselves Communists.

The Socialist Labour League is the British section of the Fourth International. Its revolutionary programme and its daily paper represent what Trotsky fought for all his life.

Its members are fighters in the class struggle, basing themselves on the method of Marxism. They will reject with contempt the lying distortions of the renegade Whelan, and conclude that in lining up, temporarily at least, with the Pabloite revisionists of the IMG, he takes the logical step from his petty-bourgeois empiricism, while at the same time marking a further step in the theoretical and political degeneration of the IMG itself.